Hey TransducerX
Farview is right.
You know how the record head looks on an analog recorder right? And the tape just runs over that stationary head, right?
Well, and if you know this alrady
please don't take offense...just trying to fill you in if you weren't aware
, but the head on a VCR spins, like a barrel on its side, and the tape passes over the side of the barrel. The barrel isn't exactly perpendicular to the tape travel path either, it is angled so that the info that gets printed to tape is in diagonal stripes accross the tape rather than parallel to the tape. So it isn't linear analog audio, it is non-linear digital audio. Its the same way with any digital tape recorder whether it be an ADAT, DAT, or DTRS like
the Tascam DA38, 78, 88, etc. So a hi fi VCR
is a digital two-track audio tape recorder, but that's not what its speciality is. Hence the analog to digital converters (and digital to analog as well) are going to be low-quality and low performance in terms of their specifications. Trying to get the audio portion to be of better quality and or trying to add tracks to would be doing what Alesis did with the ADAT, which, though VERY popular, did have its ups and downs.
Really was an innovative bit of kit and what they did right (as opposed to what happened to the poor AKAI MG1212/1214, which was originally supposed to use a Beta tape shell but there were haggles over licensing or something) was use a readily available format (the VHS tape), but of course the converters, head design and such were proprietary. We can also thank Alesis though for the very popular ADAT optical lightpipe. Really has stood the test of time and made its debut on their ADAT decks.
So, IMHO, trying to do something more with the hi-fi VHS format, though a fun topic, is probably not realistic. Developing a proprietary head design for that format, a road which has already been traveled (and is far less traveled today thanks to the affordability of computer-based recording, which has a far less mechanical transport
), would be an exercise in futility. I think a venture like that would be silly expensive too, though again I would say for general purpose two-track recording the hi-fi VHS
can fit the bill if it sounds good to the individual.